Twenty-four UW-Madison engineering seniors and graduate students who had enrolled in a mechanical engineering course in fluid power recently received an email that read, in part: “Unfortunately, due to budget reductions, the mechanical engineering department will not be able to hire an instructor for ME 545 for spring 2013.”
A: On Dec. 3 the high temperature of 65 degrees F was the all-time highest December temperature ever recorded in Madison. Among the interesting aspects of this record high was the fact that the entire day was cloudy so local sunshine had no role in achieving this record. This prompts an interesting question ? what processes can contribute to changing the temperature at a location? The answer is that there are basically two. Everyone knows that on a sunny, windless day, the fact that the sun is out always contributes to warming the air temperature. At night, in the absence of sunshine, the air cools. These changes are a result of radiative transfer, one of the two mechanisms.
Swarthmore College biologist Scott Gilbert, known for his ability to relate complex biological concepts to everyday life, will deliver two free public talks in Madison on Wednesday and Thursday.
Work by UW?Madison psychologist Paula Niedenthal is included by New York Times columnist David Brooks in a roundup of social science research.
Q: NASA?s Curiosity rover was rumored to have found something exciting in Martian soil samples. If there really is ? or was ? life on Mars, what kind of life forms are we talking about?
A: Despite fanciful early descriptions of elaborate “canals” crisscrossing the Martian surface, exhaustive imaging of the Red Planet has revealed no signs of any advanced civilization. Instead, any extraterrestrial life is most likely to be microbial, said UW?Madison geoscientist Clark Johnson.
The five faculty members from the University of Wisconsin selected to be fellows of the American Physical Society were unveiled yesterday, highlighting diversity in scientific excellence and the importance of collaborative opportunities.
Five University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers were named fellows in the American Physical Society Wednesday in recognition of significant research contributions using physics in science and technology.
Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus (like those performed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the UW?Madison) to special reviews?and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret.
One recent report from UW-Madison?s Applied Population Lab projects the number of deer hunters in the state could fall to 400,000 by 2030. That?s nearly a 40 percent decline from two decades ago when more than 650,000 Wisconsinites would head out in pursuit of a trophy buck ? or at least a good time at deer camp with the buddies. But the implications are significant and go well beyond the estimated $1.4 billion economic boost and 25,000 jobs hunting provides to the state.
Imagine holding a state-of-the-art research laboratory in the palm of your hand. The device can go anywhere you go, and nearly anyone can operate it. What would you do with it?A team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison already have a plan. They hope to use the device to create a faster and cheaper diagnostic test for necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC. NEC is a medical condition that causes the death of intestinal tissue and is primarily seen in premature newborns.
Quoted: Katie Brenner, a post-doctoral researcher in Douglas Weibel?s lab at UW-Madison
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent letters to several U.S. politicians Monday urging them to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, an organization that funds animal research at many universities across the country, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the letters, PETA condemns UW-Madison among other universities ? including Columbia University and the University of California-San Francisco ? for conducting ?costly? research studies which ?do nothing to advance human health? when the money could be spent on ?safe? research.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of the Climate Action 350 and Madison residents joined in a protest Monday presenting the UW Foundation with more than 1,200 petition signatures requesting the foundation end its investment in fossil fuels to help decrease the threat of climate change. Climate Action 350-UW is a student group that works to reduce climate change resulting from the unsafe amount of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere, according to UW-Madison junior Emmy Burns.
Energy needs a Nate Silver. Perhaps Gregory Nemet of the University of Wisconsin is that guy.
A: Rescue or salvage archaeology, according to UW-Madison anthropology Professor Sissel Schroeder, is undertaken under two major circumstances: ?The first is when an archaeological site has already been inadvertently damaged through construction, mining, quarrying, or other forms of ground disturbance,? she explained. ?The second is when some kind of construction or other form of disturbance is planned, including proposed dams that will cover sites with water.?
An innovative device that will allow doctors to externally monitor brain pressure in children with hydrocephalus ? thereby avoiding invasive and dangerous surgery ? is inching its way toward commercial use. The tiny implant was invented at UW Hospital by a neurosurgeon who loves to tinker with electronics and cobbled the prototype together on a coffee table in his basement with parts from Radio Shack.
A: Since we live in a country with a famous Tornado Alley right in its center, it is easy to forget that severe weather can occur, though with substantially less frequency, in other parts of the world.A recent example of this is the flooding in Venice, Italy in early November and the strong tornado that roared through Teranto, Italy on Nov. 28.
Even our footsteps can generate power, by driving a salty liquid through microscopic pores in a shoe sole to deliver up to two watts per leg, using a “reverse electrowetting” device developed by Professor Tom Krupenkin at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This is more than sufficient to power such common devices as smartphones and tablets,” he says. “We expect the first product prototype to be available in one to two years.”
The University of Wisconsin dropped one spot to No. 4 this year in the top-five rankings for all research universities in the United States.
Wisconsin?s first recreational hunt for wolves is nearing an end and as the hunt itself winds down, attention will turn to analysis and to what is, hopefully, a scientific assessment of the season and its impact on the state?s wolf population. Much of that work will focus, appropriately, on population densities in the wake of the hunt and implications for future quotas….Not long after the hunt started, UW-Madison researcher Adrian Treves released a study that confirmed what most suspected ? public attitudes toward the wolf deteriorated in the months and years prior to approval of the hunting season.
Five University of Wisconsin-Madison professors were named as fellows in the American Association for the Advancement of Science Thursday. UW-Madison faculty that will be recognized include Professor of Plant Pathology Paul G. Ahlquist, Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics Kyung Mann Kim, Professor of Psychiatry Ned H. Kalin, Professor of Chemical and Biological engineering Thomas F. Kuech and Professor of Life Sciences Communication Dietram A. Scheufele.
An expert on environmental attitudes warned Tuesday that a shift in public attitudes toward wolves could endanger the species? presence in Wisconsin.
It looks as if UW-Stevens Point could give its students a taste of that ancient to them piece of constitutional history known as the 18th Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition. Among the options before a task force created last year on campus alcohol and drug use is banning booze in all dorms, even for dorm residents of legal drinking age. The UW System is not aware of any such efforts at its other campuses, system spokesman David Giroux said.
Quoted: Richard Brown, director of the UW-Madison Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles.
America needs more workers with expertise in science and math. America needs more entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to start businesses and create jobs here. And that?s why America needs Congress to pass the bipartisan Startup Act 2.0 bill ? with or without a larger package of immigration reforms. The proposal would provide more visas to foreign students who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in science, math, technology and engineering.
University of Michigan has topped its public peers in research and development spending for the third year in a row, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Wisconsin universities could lose almost 50 million dollars of federally funded research grants unless congress passes legislation to stop sequestration.
Memorial High School senior Sohil Shah is at an academic level above most of his peers. Sohil, 17, who takes classes and conducts research at UW-Madison, also is more advanced than many college students. Findings from his nanoscience research project were published in the prestigious Journal of Materials Chemistry ? a feat that could be expected of third-year doctorate students, said Robert Hamers, chemistry professor at UW-Madison and Sohil?s mentor.
Billed as the biggest telescope in the world, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory on the South Pole, is a project with roots in Wisconsin and now University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to tell the project?s story around the state.
Deborah Blum [See her home page ], never shy about reinventing herself, entered college to become a scientist before switching majors and colleges to pursue a journalism degree, later quit her journalism job to study science writing, came back to newspaper reporting as a science writer, then left journalism again to devote herself full-time to book writing and teaching journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cardiovascular diseases cost $444 billion in the U.S. each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Taking low-cost aspirin to prevent heart disease and strokes seems like a no-brainer. In some cases, it is. But even aspirin, as harmless as it seems, illustrates an important maxim of health care: Every drug or procedure carries potential risk. Aspirin helps prevent dangerous clotting of the blood but increases the risk of bleeding, especially in the intestines. Too few Wisconsin residents who could benefit from preventive aspirin therapy are taking it, but so are too many people who could be harmed, a UW-Madison study found.
UW-Madison?s Clark Johnson, a geoscientist, has spent years thinking about and studying extraterrestrial life ? where we are most likely to find it and what it is probably going to look like. Don?t expect little green men.
“When I give talks,” Johnson said, “I Photoshop a dinosaur onto Mars? surface. If we saw that, there?d be no doubt about life. But it is a much more cryptic message that we?re looking for.”
Also quoted: John Valley, a UW-Madison scientist who specializes in geochemistry.
A: In 1803, British pharmacist and chemist Luke Howard devised a classification system for clouds. It has proved so successful that meteorologists have used Howard?s system ever since, with minor modifications. According to his system, clouds are given Latin names corresponding to their appearance ? layered or convective ? and their altitude. Clouds are also categorized based on whether or not they are precipitating.
The new University of Wisconsin Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, designed to benefit K-12 science teachers in the classroom, will help teachers live up to new federal standards.
A: As the remnants of Superstorm Sandy approached us on Oct. 29, people in Wisconsin observed a halo on two consecutive nights. These halos resulted from the ice clouds generated from the storm. A halo is a whitish ring that encircles but does not touch the sun or moon. It is an optical phenomenon that owes its existence to the bending of light by ice crystals, much like the ?rainbow crystals? you may hang in your windows.
A: Sort of, said Susan Nitzke, UW-Madison emeritus professor of nutritional science. But let?s start by eliminating from consideration an amino acid commonly known as tryptophan. ?Tryptophan and sleepiness probably deserves classification as an urban legend,? Nitzke said. ?It?s true that tryptophan can make a person tired if it?s ingested on its own on an empty stomach. In truth, it doesn?t happen that way for anybody ? especially on Thanksgiving.?
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are conducting groundbreaking research on ?lake mixing? as a tool to control fish species composition.Deep lakes tend to stratify into two layers, the upper layer warm and the lower layer cold. Different fish species require different water temperatures, so mixing the lake can have major implications for some sensitive fish species.
?Nothing like this has been done before,? said Jake Vander Zanden, professor of limnology and zoology at UW-Madison, referring to mixing up the lake?s temperature zones.
UW is now invested in climate change. Our professors? well-deserved pensions are paid partially from the revenues of the fossil fuel industry. Accordingly, any positive activism we do surrounding climate change, sustainability or environmentalism must be accompanied by a crucial push for divestment or else we?re simply betting against ourselves. We just opened an Office of Sustainability. We have a wide variety of departments, classes and programs which highlight the dangers and moral hazards of climate change. As an institution, we must put our money where our mouth is.
….Of course, we?ll continue to fight the most egregious projects, from the Keystone XL pipeline to drilling in the Arctic, and we?ll continue to hope that the administration will take more than half-hearted moves to keep carbon in the ground. But we?re not counting on our politicians anymore. After 20 years of general inaction on climate change, while the world?s emissions and the planet?s temperature have continued to soar, it?s time to engage the real power: a reckless fossil fuel industry that has known for years the damage they?re doing. Until they cease exploring for new hydrocarbons and begin the rapid conversion to energy companies installing renewable energy on a vast scale, they don?t deserve the social license our silence grants them.
Last month Dario Maestripieri, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago, lamented on Facebook that there was a lack of ?attractive women? at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. I wasn?t there, but I would probably pass Maestripieri?s ?super model type? test, at least to the extent that any woman looks like that in the real world. He has been thoroughly eviscerated by now, but his remarks are an opportunity to reflect on how attractive women are treated in the academy.
Are Wisconsinites wary of wolves? A study from UW-Madison researchers found an increasingly negative view of the animal by state residents. The study published in an upcoming issue of the journal Conservation Biology shows a declining tolerance of wolves, even if those surveyed had no intimate contact with a wolf. The study was by environmental studies professor Adrian Treves and colleagues Lisa Naughton-Treves and Victoria Shelley, according to a news release from the UW-Madison news service.
It has taken a nightmarish hurricane in the waning days of a bitter presidential race to do it, but the phrase ?climate change? has again made its way onto front pages. And, perhaps because of the tragic images of people struggling on the East Coast, the issue has taken on fresh urgency. Earlier this week, Gus Speth, a noted environmental lawyer and advocate and a guest speaker at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies on the UW-Madison campus, said the often-ignored topic of climate change ?is now being put forth by reality.?
Mentioned: Ken Potter, UW-Madison professor of civil and environmental engineering
Although neither candidate focused much on the subject during the 2012 election, experts say climate change is a growing threat to the nation.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a method to more efficiently convert biomass into high-demand chemicals and energy-dense fuels. The break through is the discovery that gamma-valerolactone, GVL, works as an ideal solvent in processing the two main components of plant biomass, hemicellulose and cellulose.
The LaFarge Birthing Center, which opened in 1993 as an alternative to home births for Amish women, has had a 3.8 percent cesarean section delivery rate, according to a UW-Madison study released Monday.
Madison?s Far East Side residents shouldn?t be surprised if they?re asked to participate in a statewide health survey in the coming weeks. The Survey of Health of Wisconsin (SHOW), an ongoing project of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, will be recruiting participants on the Far East Side for interviews this week and the weeks of Nov. 26 and Dec. 10. Randomly selected households could receive a letter asking them to participate in the study, which is used to create a general portrait of health in Wisconsin.
A: We?re improving by leaps and bounds (in some respects), according to Christopher Velden, senior researcher at the University of Wisconsin?Madison?s Space Science and Engineering Center. ?In terms of the track of a storm ? where it?s going to go and when ? the forecast has gotten much better in the last few decades,? Velden said. That?s attributable to new hardware and software, and quality data.
A: A nor?easter is an extratropical cyclone that affects the northeastern United States and extreme eastern Canada. An extratropical cyclone is a low-pressure system that forms outside of the tropics and is usually associated with fronts, unlike a tropical cyclone. A nor?easter is named for the strong northeasterly winds that blow across this region as the path of the low pressure moves northeastward, slightly to the east of the North American coastline.
Stress during infancy can predict symptoms of anxiety and depression in female adolescents, according to a study published online Sunday and in the journal Nature Neuroscience on Monday. Stress in female children is related to higher levels of the hormone cortisol, which may lead to altered brain function in adolescence, according to the study, written by a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For some girls, stressful experiences in the first year of life seem to drive hormonal changes later in childhood. And these chemical changes, in turn, lead to abnormal brain connectivity and signs of anxiety and depression at age 18, suggests a study published today in Nature Neuroscience1.
The Morgridge Institute for Research and three subcontractors have received a $23.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate to be put toward improving software development to protect new technologies against potential threats.
Noted: “This research directly addresses the public health burden in the U.S. as far as rising rates of hypertension among young adults, especially with the growing rate of obesity,” said Dr. Heather Johnson, lead study author from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Torben Lutjen, a political scientist at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, is researching political polarization in the United States as a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A recent report from the President?s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology projects a shortfall of one million college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) over the next decade. Approximately five to six of every 10 students that begin in a STEM major will switch majors to a non-STEM field before graduation. A team of researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and University of Colorado-Boulder are undertaking a study to examine the reasons why students are switching out of STEM majors at such a high rate.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security?s Science and Technology Directorate granted $19.6 million to the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery Thursday for a Software Assurance Marketplace research center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The five-year grant will help researchers work to improve security on the development of software used in technologies from medical devices to the national power grid.
Noted: The video was made by F. Governato and T. Quinn of the University of Washington, A. Brooks from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and J. Wadsley from McMaster University.
The promise of stem cell research has been protected by President Obama, but the election of Mitt Romney would send Wisconsin?s signature biotechnology field back into chaos, costing the state its national reputation as a good home forward-looking, job-creating business, to say nothing of dashing the hopes of thousands of patients waiting for new therapies to treat incurable diseases such as Parkinson?s, Alzheimers and diabetes.
Baby girls living in a stressed environment may be more prone to anxiety when they get older than those living in a less stressful environment. The University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have been following a group of families since the early 90s.
In 2005 Elizabeth Goodwin, PhD, a geneticist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, admitted to manipulating data on a research grant application in order to convince reviewers that her lab was worthy of the money it was requesting. She was turned in by graduate students working at her lab. Just this last week, Dr. Thomas Zdeblick, a surgeon at UW-Madison, was found to have received $34 million from a company called Medtronic because he allowed employees at that company to ghost-write papers with his name on them, which advocated the use of a controversial and ineffective spinal treatment the company was promoting. These papers failed to disclose that the spinal treatment being advocated for had been shown to cause sterility in men. These two cases exemplify a problem in modern scientific research funding: The incentive to cheat is incredibly high.
A: Colonial insects, including honeybees, bumblebees, paper wasps and yellow jackets, have one queen and many workers, said Phil Pellitteri, a distinguished faculty associate in the department of entomology at UW-Madison. ?Honeybees are the only species that overwinters as a colony; they don?t go dormant and have to generate enough heat to live, so they need a minimum population of bees and plenty of honey, their energy source.?
A: Nearly a week after Hurricane Sandy struck the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, the affected region is still reeling from the shock. This really was an unprecedented storm in the truest sense of that word. Among the amazing aspects of the event was the extraordinarily accurate and early forecasting of the storm. Numerical forecast models were latching on to the correct scenario, including the unusual and rapid leftward turn off the Mid-Atlantic coast, as early as five to seven days before the event (depending on the particular model in question).
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard?s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.
